Scott Bush

It was The Ruins alright… specif­i­cally, it ruined my din­ner, which I almost lost while watch­ing this one. Not scary, but gory and gross (remem­ber Kathy Bates bash­ing James Caan’s legs in Mis­ery? The Ruins has a scene that puts that to shame).

In the “pro” col­umn is an excel­lent con­cept: a Mayan tem­ple cov­ered in a dia­bol­i­cal man-eating vine. It’s sequestered by the locals, avoided by birds, and appar­ently only a cab ride away from a party resort. Another pro: actor Jonathan Tucker (Jeff in the movie) looks a hell of a lot like Chris­t­ian Bale. Made me think I was watch­ing Bat­man on vaca­tion in Mexico.

In the “con” col­umn is just about every­thing else. It’s end­ing suf­fers from the typ­i­cal “let’s keep the hor­ror going!” syn­drome (The Ring is the only movie that did that well). A few scenes feel like they’re shoe-horned in from the book, such as Stacy’s accu­sa­tion of infi­delity between Amy and Eric. If I read the book (which I won’t, but Matthew Bald­win did and pro­vides a review over at Defec­tiveYeti) I’m sure it would seem less forced. The first major “attack” of the vines in the tem­ple was unbe­liev­ably cheesey (think Muppet-show qual­ity), but later inter­ac­tions with it were much bet­ter and the under-the-skin stuff actu­ally looked good, too.

In ret­ro­spect I may be too hard on it. It grossed me out, couldn’t watch dur­ing a few scenes, and was tense while antic­i­pat­ing some­thing bad about to hap­pen. That pretty much sums up this sort of movie.

Oh, and kudos to my friend Tara. At the open­ing scene, she cor­rectly iden­ti­fied the only char­ac­ter to sur­vive until the end. Her guess? The only actress she rec­og­nized, Jena Mal­one (she was in one of my favorites, Don­nie Darko, and voiced a char­ac­ter in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle). It’s a pretty safe bet in a hor­ror movie.

“Of course they don’t!” I hear (sane, nor­mal) peo­ple thun­der when they read this post’s title. “I agree!” I scream back. That’s how pas­sion­ate I am about dog cloth­ing. We’ve all seen the dreaded dog sweater, which is hor­ri­ble (note how most of the dogs are chi­huahuas or other minis­cule purse-living dogs). Yet, in some sick way I can almost under­stand how it can be cute or funny or just a way to sell a uni­ver­sity logo to alumni with too much dis­pos­able income.

But not dog shoes. No. The line must be drawn here.

“Surely you jest!” shout the masses of nor­mal peo­ple. “I do not!” Is my reply. Gasps of shock all around as I present… “bark ‘n boots”

I ran into these abom­i­na­tions at a tent sale at a sport­ing goods store, which I can only hope means they were shunned long enough to be marked down thrice and shuf­fled off to the park­ing lot to be sold with the cheap LED camp­ing lanterns no one wanted.

The crux of the issue is this: dogs were wild ani­mals who walked, ran, trot­ted, and jumped all over the place for thou­sands of years with­out the need for gor­tex and nylon around their paws. I can only imag­ine the poor dog’s dis­com­fort and annoy­ance after their mis­guided mas­ter tugged them on. (I won­der if they come with one of those cone-shaped col­lars vets make dogs wear so they won’t chew on their sur­gi­cal wounds?) Why in the world would a dog want to wear boots?

Luck­ily, the geniuses at grip trex antic­i­pated that ques­tion and were kind enough to answer it, I’m sure after many dog­gie focus groups or per­haps canine mind-reading ses­sions. Here’s a photo, but sadly my cam­era phone doesn’t cap­ture leg­i­ble text at that size. Let me sum­ma­rize: a bunch of mar­ket­ing speak that points out why these brand of dog shoes are bet­ter than oth­ers (there are other man­u­fac­tur­ers?!). I don’t believe “Seam­less con­struc­tion reduces abra­sion and improves fit” is a rea­son why a (sane) dog would want to wear boots. Sure, these might be the equiv­a­lent of Birken­stoks, Crocs, or what­ever is con­sid­ered the most com­fort­able shoes these days… but guess what? DOGS DON’T WEAR SHOES. It’s like a human buy­ing a feather comb. Best feather comb on the mar­ket: all-metal con­struc­tion, gold-tipped ends, etc. but still point­less… to a human.

I could rant for a while longer about point­less prod­ucts serv­ing a need that doesn’t exist (this, this, or just about any­thing else sold in a Sky­mall cat­a­log) but I know it’s futile. Peo­ple will still buy crap they think they need.

UPDATE: My friend and dog owner, Eric, has com­mented and pointed out that some­times these dog shoes are use­ful safety acces­sories. His expe­ri­ence (or, his dog Sam’s expe­ri­ence) is prob­a­bly the rea­son this prod­uct exists. But I stand by my point about dog­gie sweaters!

PPC, or “Pay Per Click” adver­tis­ing is huge these days, and rightly so. Every­one searches when using the inter­net, whether it be Google or Yahoo or Microsoft’s Live Search. This inte­gral fea­ture of the Inter­net is pro­vided free of charge because these com­pa­nies get ad rev­enue from the sim­ple text-based ads that appear along the side of the “organic” results, pre­sented under the moniker “spon­sored” results.

The sim­plic­ity of the ads—a title, two lines of text, and a URL—belies the com­plex­ity of the process by which they appear. I won’t go into it here because (a) you won’t read pages of expla­na­tion about key­word analy­sis, bid­ding strate­gies, and group­ing of ads to improve qual­ity scores; and (b) you can read a great expla­na­tion at O’Reilly’s site if you do want to read pages about it. It suf­fices to know that it’s an auc­tion: you bid to have your ad appear when some­one searches for a rel­e­vant key­word. Sup­pose you sell dog food. Some­one searches Yahoo for “dog food,” so you want your ad to appear so they can click it and, with any luck, buy 50 lbs. of your kibble.

The auc­tion is tricky. There’s lots to it and even if you make it in the list con­sis­tently, you might get shaken out of posi­tion by a new­comer. Is there a bet­ter way? Well, some com­pa­nies offer “direct-placement” ads. These are the same ads, but these com­pa­nies guar­an­tee they’ll appear in one of the top 3 posi­tions for whichever set of key­words (or phrases) you pay for. Seems good, right? Then why doesn’t every­one do it?

I inves­ti­gated one of these com­pa­nies, Nett Solu­tions, after a cold-call from them. I was skep­ti­cal. I’d never heard of direct-placement ads and their model flew in the face of the search engine’s auc­tion model. But, I was curi­ous. I spoke with a PPC cam­paign man­ager who told me even it were pos­si­ble, the keyphrases they’d be able to offer would be so obscure as to be worth­less (imag­ine buy­ing “pur­ple dog house“—no one’s search­ing for that so it’s worth­less if you sell dog houses). I read dozens of forum posts on search engine sites about peo­ple who’d been burned by scam com­pa­nies sell­ing this ser­vice. Most of those dis­cussed cus­tomers’ sites’ rank­ings being hurt—or removed altogether—because the scam com­pa­nies achieved their goals tem­porar­ily by gam­ing the search engines’s sys­tems. I even spoke to my Google AdWords rep­re­sen­ta­tive, who told me flat-out “Google does not par­tic­i­pate in direct-placement ads.” Fair enough, I thought. It can’t be done (at least legit­i­mately). I included this info in my rec­om­men­da­tion of PPC-management ven­dors. But my man­ager was curi­ous (he knew a thing or two about Inter­net mar­ket­ing) and wanted to call their bluff. “Uhhh, okay” I said and began work­ing with Nett Solutions.

This post is get­ting long, so I’ll sum­ma­rize in three points:

1. It worked — We chose seven keyphrases—relevant ones, too. We were given a price for each (on the order of a few hun­dred dol­lars a month) and paid a very mod­est start-up fee of $100. Within a few days the ads were up. We checked night and day, from var­i­ous computers—even had out-of-state friends look. The ads were always there and I never saw it out­side of the first posi­tion (above the organic list­ings) after a few days. I was impressed.
2. It didn’t work — Despite this, our click-throughs (CTs) were abysmal. After a few weeks I asked for a report of impres­sions so we could see whether the (a) ads weren’t being seen that often so our CTs were low, or (b) our ads were being seen but they weren’t com­pelling (I gotta say, they were). Nett Solu­tions couldn’t pro­vide one. “Wait until three months,” they said. That’s ridicu­lous. I pressed on and finally got one after two months. Kind of. It only pro­vided CTs, not impres­sions. The CTs were about 10x higher than our web met­rics reported (I’d set up spe­cial URLs for the ads to bet­ter track the results). When I asked about the dis­crep­ancy and why no impres­sions were included, I was instead given a sales pitch to help cre­ate bet­ter land­ing pages for the campaigns.
3. Salesy - They were very much focused on sales. The first guy I spoke to was a sales­man. He talked a lot about the report­ing we’d get when I asked about it, but once the deal was sealed I never spoke to him again. I worked with an account man­ager who, as men­tioned, tried to sell me on land­ing page assis­tance rather than answer my ques­tions. Yet another person–the most hon­est of the group—actually cre­ated the ads. Or, I should say fixed the ads because the first batch went live with­out me writ­ing, approv­ing, or even see­ing them.

To be fair, they did every­thing they said they would. No impres­sions were guar­an­teed or even sug­gested, and they did say that cam­paign reports wouldn’t be avail­able for three months (but the sales guy did say he could get them for me when I asked). And they respected my can­cel­la­tion request with­out any trouble.

So, if I’m ever asked about direct-placement ads I’ll answer: yep, they “work,” but I wouldn’t go that route. Money is much bet­ter spent on hir­ing a rep­utable PPC man­age­ment com­pany. It’s trans­par­ent (both you and the com­pany can access the adver­tis­ing inter­face) and there’s no games.

First off: OWA is Out­look Web Access, the web-based ver­sion of Microsoft’s e-mail, cal­en­dar, and con­tact man­ager. Typ­i­cally you use it when you’re away from your work com­puter but need to check your work e-mail (to learn the lat­est office gos­sip or which ben­e­fit the com­pany is cut­ting next; that sort of thing). Today, I’m using as I work from home.

Now, OWA is pretty cool, espe­cially the lat­est ver­sion. (In fact, Xml­HttpRe­quest, the tech­nol­ogy behind most cool web appli­ca­tions like Gmail, was first devel­oped by the OWA peo­ple.) How­ever, the dirty lit­tle secret behind OWA is its mouth-breathing cousin, OWA Light. A great com­par­i­son of the two can be found here.

Hav­ing devel­oped web apps before, I know about cross-browser dif­fi­cul­ties, and hav­ing worked for a cor­po­ra­tion I know about fiscally-driven busi­ness deci­sions. So I under­stand the OWA team at MS prob­a­bly sat down and said “let’s give those losers on the Mac and Firefox-using counter-culturists some­thing so the Jus­tice depart­ment keeps off our backs.” Just kid­ding. Seri­ously, giv­ing up some advanced fea­tures like adding/editing mail rules, view­ing mes­sages in con­ver­sa­tion mode, and recov­er­ing deleted items seems jus­ti­fied. Other fea­tures are on the fence and prob­a­bly only mat­ter if you need them: access­ing the Tasks mod­ule (I don’t even know what that is, so I don’t care) and view­ing your cal­en­dar in any­thing but day view.

Some fea­tures are absolute essen­tial and why they’re miss­ing I can’t under­stand. My two big­gies: mes­sage flags and search.

• Mes­sage flags — I orga­nize my inbox and track what I need to do (in part) with flagged mes­sages. Some­one requests a change on the site but I’m too busy right this sec­ond to do it–boom, red flag. An e-mail with a web­site I need gets flagged green for ref­er­ence. Some­times I use pur­ple or orange flags for a bunch of mes­sages that come in for a spe­cific project. Quite use­ful, but it’s miss­ing. Why? Sim­ple thing to do. Even if MS left out sort­ing or search­ing by flag, they could’ve imple­mented a sim­ple drop-down menu with col­ors in it to rep­re­sent the flags. There’s no cross-browser con­cern there.
• Search — I am a Gmail user (okay, fanatic might be a bet­ter term). It’s sim­plic­ity and power in search is amaz­ing. OWA Light has no search… unless you want to search your con­tacts or address book. This is a non-trivial fea­ture, I know. But hon­estly, some­thing as inte­gral as search­ing e-mail! Why wouldn’t they have included this at the expense of other fea­tures or sim­ply said “even non-IE users need search!”

Okay, I feel bet­ter for hav­ing said my piece. I’m prob­a­bly stuck with OWA Light until I get my nice new Mac­book Pro where I can run Win­dows (at a decent speed) and use the desk­top Out­look client.

My Sat­ur­day evening was spent swel­ter­ing in the 88-degree heat of the NW Mar­tial Arts dojo. What pos­sessed me to do such a thing? The jō. Not this Joe, or this Joe, or even this Jo(lene): this jō. The dojo held a sem­i­nar on it.

The jō, or short staff, is a great weapon. It’s cer­tainly not the dead­liest (that honor prob­a­bly goes to the sword) or the most men­ac­ing (I’d nom­i­nate the kusarigama for that). In fact, it’s because of its sim­plic­ity that gives it its util­ity. When’s the last time you were walk­ing around with a sword or pair of nun­chaku? Prob­a­bly not recently (if at all). But a jō is really just a walk­ing stick… no one would ques­tion you walk­ing around with wooden stiff about an inch in diam­e­ter com­ing up to your armpit.

In the sem­i­nar we learned the aikido kata (unimag­i­na­tively) called “Jō 1.” It con­sists of twenty-two steps and it really is sim­ple. Like all kata, though, there is an amaz­ing amount to learn and prac­tice and apply from the kata. I was treated to two excel­lent prac­ti­tion­ers of the weapon per­form­ing the kata and man, does it look great. The tim­ing of the count­ing (in Japan­ese of course) sounds equally cool.

The jō is a rel­a­tive of the spear, and so many of the tech­niques are thrusts as though it were topped with a deadly point. We worked on ways to use the jō. The sim­plest was as reg­u­lar upper block where the jō is held out­ward with an “unbend­able arm”—trust me, punch­ing into that a few times will dis­suade an attacker. More com­pli­cated tech­niques included a judo-style throw where the jō is grabbed by the attacker; you then step for­warded to break their pos­ture, place it behind their knee, and throw to where the attacker is now weak (it’s def­i­nitely eas­ier to under­stand visu­ally instead of verbally).

I’ll try and post more about my mar­tial arts study, as it really has been a large part of my life for nearly a year now.

If you’ve been on the Inter­webs at all in the last year or so, you’ve prob­a­bly come across a link to the YouTube phe­nom known either as the “I like tur­tles kid” or “Zombie-faced kid.” If you haven’t, that’s odd, but here you go: Zom­bie Kid Likes Tur­tles. It’s been viewed over 5 mil­lion times (it’s an easy watch, weigh­ing in at only 17 sec­onds), and has spawned dozens of remixes and par­o­dies. I admit, it’s funny for the pure sense­less­ness of the response and more for the reporter’s stunned response.

Any­way, I ran across this video of the same reporter who tracked the boy down and inter­viewed him and his fam­ily. It’s not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing in itself, but it does show how inte­grated the web is into main­stream life now. Case in point: the sis­ter first heard about her brother’s then-nascent pop­u­lar­ity from a friend’s post on her MySpace page.